Friday, March 17, 2017

March comes in like a lion, the proverb says, and this is surely true of the march of the tabs, which have accumulated unpruned on TOF's tab-bar over the unruly winter months, frozen on the branches like cherry blossoms in global warming. Hereunder, with appropriately short shrift:

THE INTENSE RAINSTORMS
SWEEPING IN FROM the Pacific Ocean began to pound central California on
Christmas Eve in 1861 and continued virtually unabated for 43 days. The
deluges quickly transformed rivers running down from the Sierra Nevada
mountains along the state’s eastern border into raging torrents that swept away entire communities and mining settlements. The rivers and rains poured
into the state’s vast Central Valley, turning it into an inland sea 300
miles long and 20 miles wide. Thousands of people died, and one quarter
of the state’s estimated 800,000 cattle drowned. Downtown Sacramento was
submerged under 10 feet of brown water filled with debris from
countless mudslides on the region’s steep slopes. California’s
legislature, unable to function, moved to San Francisco until Sacramento dried out—six months later. By then, the state was bankrupt.

It gives the usual nod to "but this time the rains will be worse because global warming blah-blah-blah," but it's hard to overlook the pre-emptive catatastrophes that look so much like those of today.

However, when the "rivers in the sky" were reported during the California deluge this winter, none of this background was reported. This was not likely because they wished to conceal the context, but because the needed more air-time for commercials. These days, you may notice they sometimes don't have enough time to complete a sentence. 2. La Grande Scazzottata Copernica is up. If you read Italian, enjoy it.

Monday, March 6, 2017

The estimable Joseph Moore has posted a review of TOF's novella "Nexus" on his blog, Yard Sale of the Mind.

A: Review: Michael Flynn’s Novella Nexsus in this month’s Analog

A reconstruction of a conversation taking place around 12:30 a.m.
last night, as my wife is entering the bedroom where I am just putting
down the latest issues of Analog:

“Reading Mike Flynn?”

“Just finished. It has about every ridiculous pulp science fiction
idea you’ve ever heard of in one place: time travel, appalling space
aliens, space aliens that can pass for human, telepathy, faster than
light travel, transporter beams, androids…”

“What’s it about?”

“Aristotelian causality.”

There is a woman who can’t die, a weather balloon cover story, ninja
space cops, weird alien necrophilia (PG-13), alien invaders, aliens
working under cover to protect earth from alien invaders. There’s
Theadora the hooker-Empress, conflicting time-lines, the need to keep
the cops and the military out of it, and super-ninja space cops.

Trying to remember if Area 51 gets a shout out.

And, yes, it all hangs on what Aristotle would call in Greek a
‘walking together’ – a series of coincidences – the component events of
which are most definitely caused (they literally could not not be) but
the walking together itself is just Fate, which takes the blame but is
not, strictly speaking, a cause.

To sum up: Totally awesome. Mr. Flynn has made no direct comments on
the whole Pulp Revolution stuff of which I am aware (wise man) – but,
based on this, he’s down with it, at least conceptually.
++++++++++++++++

If every person is the hero of his own story, then every country is the center of the world. Geography is not fate, but it will often do until Fate comes a-knocking on the door, so what does Russia look like when the world is centered on it?